Domain names for four of Australiaâs capital cities have gone been listed for sale.
Sydney.com.au, melbourne.com.au, brisbane.com.au and adelaide.com.au have been listed for sale, as well as auction.com.au, at namesell.com with the sale being brokered by Domain Guardians
Domain names for four of Australiaâs capital cities have gone been listed for sale.
Sydney.com.au, melbourne.com.au, brisbane.com.au and adelaide.com.au have been listed for sale, as well as auction.com.au, at namesell.com with the sale being brokered by Domain Guardians.
The domains are offered for sale as a bundle, as groupings of one or more, or as individual domains and come up for sale prior to the launch of the top level domains .sydney and .melbourne, which the state governments of New South Wales and Victoria have applied for respectively.
Mike Robertson from Domain Guardians said the sale presents an opportunity for a major player to own the commercial domain names mirroring four of Australia’s five largest capital cities.
âThese domains/websites could provide a local entity or leading international corporation with a unique opportunity to become the dominant online player in Australia.
The sites are owned by companies involving three partners – former journalist Rod Ashcroft, businessman Michael Tancredi and It-specialist Phill Bertolus, reported The Australian newspaper.
Mr Tancredi told the paper that the trio originally bought the domain names around 1995-96 for “no sale price”. They had been developed as basic tourism sites.
âThere is no other situation in the world where a company or individual owns 85% of the country’s capital city domains,âsaid Robertson. In the US, most leading corporations are lucky to own one two capital city domain names.
âSydney.com.au is the No.1 ranked website in the Google.com.au search results when you search on the word ‘sydney’.
Mr Robertson said sydney.com.au and melbourne.com.au are lightly developed as tourism websites and already generate attractive revenue streams.
He said there is huge scope to broaden the websites to include residential and commercial property sales, car sales, job listings, auctions, travel, tourism, accommodation and entertainment and make these the stand-out websites for Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide.
âAll traffic coming to the site is organic and free â grown from strategically placed backlinks dating back to the ’90s. The owners have never spent a cent driving traffic to sydney.com.au or any of the other city domain websites. â
For auction.com.au, Mr Robertson said the domain name is for sale, either as part of a bundle with the city websites or as a separate sale.
âThe domain name auction.com.au, commercially developed, could be one of the biggest online sales platforms in Australia.